And a pocket with four photographs, the kind that are taken in photo booths. They looked recent.
Everything in that bag indicated that it belonged to Paula Ney, and that it was Paula Ney who had been hanged in the dark hotel room that only let in a thin streak of sun at a time.
“When would Paula have moved back to the apartment?” Winter asked.
“Sometime in the future, as she put it.”
“Did she say that? Did her parents say that she said that?”
“It was the dad who said it, I guess. I asked the mom.”
Winter held up the letter, a copy of the letter. The words were the same as in the original. Those ten lines. Above them: “To Mario and Elisabeth.”
“Why did she write this? And why to her parents?”
“She didn’t have a husband,” said Ringmar.
“Answer the first question first,” said Winter.
“I don’t have an answer.”
“Was she forced to?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do we know that she wrote this letter after she disappeared, or whatever we should call it? After she left her friend at Grönsakstorget?”
“No. But we’re assuming it.”
“We’re linking the letter to the murder,” said Winter. “But maybe it’s about something else.”
“What would that be?”
They were into one of their routines, methods, questions and answers, and questions again in a stream of consciousness that might move forward or backward, any direction at all, as long as it didn’t stand still.
“Maybe she needed to get something off her chest,” said Winter. “She couldn’t say it face-to-face. Face-to-faces. Something had happened. She wanted to explain herself, or find reconciliation. Or just contact them. She wanted to leave home, for a little while. She didn’t want to be with her parents.”
“That’s wishful thinking,” said Ringmar.
“Sorry?”
“The alternative is just too horrible.”
Winter didn’t answer. Ringmar was right, of course. He had tried to see the scene in front of him because it was part of his work, and he had closed his eyes when he saw it: Paula in front of a piece of paper, someone behind her, above her. A pen in her hand. Write. Write!
“Are those her words?” Ringmar asked.
“Was she taking dictation?” Winter asked.
“Or was she allowed to write what she wanted?”
“I think so,” Winter said, reading the first sentences again.
“Why?” Ringmar asked.
“It’s too personal.”
“Maybe it’s the murderer’s personality.”
“You mean that it’s his message to the parents?”
Ringmar shrugged.
“I don’t think so,” said Winter. “They’re her words.”
“Her last words,” Ringmar said.
“If more letters don’t show up.”
“Oh, hell.”
“What does she mean by saying she wants to ask forgiveness?” Winter said, reading the words again.
“What she writes,” said Ringmar. “That she wants to ask forgiveness if she made her parents angry.”
“Is that the first thing a person thinks of in a letter like this? Would she think of that?”
“Would a person think at all?” said Ringmar. “She knows that she’s in a bad situation. She’s ordered to write a suicide note.” Ringmar fidgeted in his chair again but didn’t move it. “Yes. It’s possible that thoughts of guilt would pop up then. Same with thoughts of reconciliation.”
“Was there any guilt? I mean, real guilt?”
“Not according to her parents. Nothing that was . . . well, anything more than the usual between parents and children. There’s no old feud, or whatever you’d call it.”
“Although we don’t know that,” said Winter.
Ringmar didn’t answer. He got up and walked over to the window and looked out through the slits in the blinds. He could see the wind in the black treetops in front of Fattighusån. There was a weak light over the houses on the other side of the canal; it was something other than the clear glimmer of a high summer night.
“Have you ever been involved in something like this before, Erik?” Ringmar said without turning around. “A letter from . . . the other side.”
“The other side?”
“Come on, Erik,” Ringmar said, turning around, “the poor girl knows she’s going to be murdered and she writes a letter about love and reconciliation and forgiveness, and then we get a call from that damn flea-ridden hotel and all we can do is go there and find out what happened.”
“You’re not the only one who’s frustrated here, Bertil.”
“So—have you ever been involved with something like this before? A suicide note like this one?”
“No.”
“Written by a hand that is then painted? Painted white? As though it were . . . separate from the body?”
“No, no.”
“What the hell is going on, Erik?”
Winter got up without answering. He felt a sharp pain in his neck and across one shoulder blade. He had sat deep in concentration over the letter for too long and had forgotten to move his forty-five-year-old body, and that didn’t work anymore; he could no longer handle sitting still for very long. But he was still alive. He had his hands in front of him. He could lift them and massage his neck. He did so, lowered his hands, and walked over to Ringmar, who was still standing at the window. Winter opened it a few centimeters. He could smell the scents of the evening; there was a sort of freshness to them.
Ringmar was furious. He was professional and furious, and that was a good combination. It invigorated the imagination, urged it on. A police officer without an imagination was a poor hunter, mediocre at best. Police officers who managed to turn everything off when they stepped out of the police station and went home. Perhaps it was good for them, but it wasn’t good for their work; an officer with no imagination could turn it all off after working hours—and then wonder why he never got results. Many were like that, Winter had thought many times during his career at the CID; there were plenty of barely competent second-raters who couldn’t think farther than to the top of the hill. In that way, they were related to psychopaths, lacking the ability to think past their own noses: is there anything on the other side of the hill? Nah, I can’t see anything there, so there can’t be anything there. I think I’ll pass this car.
“I don’t know if it’s a message to us,” Winter said. “The hand. The white hand.”
“What was it about her hand?” said Ringmar.
“What do you mean?”
“Is there some . . . history surrounding her hand? Why did he paint her hand with that damn enamel paint?”
The paint came from Beckers; it was called Syntem, and it was an antique white semigloss enamel paint for indoor carpentry, furniture, walls, and iron surfaces. All of this could be read on the liter can that stood in room ten. It was the technicians’ job to establish that the paint had also been used on a human body. There was no reason to doubt it, but they had to be certain. One thing was already certain: Paula Ney had never touched the paintbrush that lay next to the can, which was nearly full. The paint that had been used had been used to paint Paula’s hand. Then the shaft of the paintbrush had been carefully wiped off.
“Nothing . . . abnormal about her hand, according to her parents,” Winter said.
Good God. Her parents hadn’t seen her hand yet. Fröberg and Öberg weren’t done with it. Winter had had to keep it from her parents and simultaneously tell them about it, ask questions about it. What a fucking job this is.
“I have all the family photos in my office,” Ringmar said.
“We won’t find anything there,” Winter said.
Ringmar didn’t answer.
“What was he going to do with it, then?” said Ringmar. “The hand?”
“You make it sound like he was carrying it with him.”
“Well, doesn’t it feel like that?”
“I don’t know, Bertil.”
“There is some reason for this. That bastard wants to say something to us. He wants to tell us something.” Ringmar flung one hand into the air. “About himself.” He looked at Winter. “Or about her.” He looked out through the window. Winter followed his gaze. There was only darkness out there. “Or about both of them.”
“They knew each other?” Winter said.
“Yes.”
“They had planned to meet at an out-of-the-way hotel? And to be on the safe side they didn’t bother to announce their arrival in the lobby?”
“Yes.”
“And we believe this?”
“No.”
“But she knew the murderer?”
“I think so, Erik.”
Winter didn’t answer.
“I have been in this damn line of work ten years longer than you, Erik, I’ve seen almost everything, but I’m having trouble putting this together.”
“We’ll put it together,” said Winter.
“Naturally,” said Ringmar, but he didn’t smile.
“Speaking of before,” said Winter. “When I was really green, it was my first year as a detective, I think, I worked on something that involved Hotel Revy.”
“This is definitely not the first time that place has been involved in an investigation,” said Ringmar. “You know that as well as I do.”
“Yes . . . but the case . . . or whatever I should call it, was special.”
Winter contemplated the night outside, a dim darkness and a dim light, as though nothing could make up its mind out there now that summer was nearly over and autumn was slowly sliding up out of the earth with the mist.
“It was a missing person,” said Winter. “I remember it now.”
“At Hotel Revy?”
“It was a woman,” said Winter. “I don’t remember her name right now. But she disappeared from her home. Was going to run some errand. She was married, I think. And as I recall she had checked in at Hotel Revy the night before she disappeared.”
“Disappeared? Disappeared to where?”
Winter didn’t answer. He sank down into his thoughts, into his memory, as the darkness out there sank over roof ridges and streets and parks and harbors and hotels.
“What happened to her?” Ringmar asked. “I guess I’ve investigated too many missing persons; they run together.”
“I don’t know,” Winter said, staring at Ringmar’s face. “No one knows. I don’t think she was ever found. No.”
• • •
Winter had been twenty-seven and a green detective, and the late summer had been greener than usual because it had rained more than usual all summer. Winter had moved through the city every day without a thought of vacation, but he had thought of the future, this future, the future of a detective; he had cut his legal studies short before they really even started in order to become a police officer, but after his training and one year in uniform and six months in plainclothes he still wasn’t sure if he wanted to devote his life to penetrating the underworld. There was so much aboveground that was so much brighter. Even when it rained. In his six months or so on the force he had seen things that normal people never see, even if they live for a hundred years. That was how he thought: normal people. The people who lived aboveground. He lived there, too, sometimes; he came and went, crawled up and crawled down again, but he knew that his life would never be “normal.” We have our own world down here, we police officers, along with our thieves and murderers and rapists. We understand. We understand one another.
He had begun to understand what understanding involved. When he did, it became easier. I’m becoming like them, he thought. The murderers.
I’m becoming more and more like them because they can never become like me.
He realized that he had to think in irregular patterns to find answers to mysteries. It was easier then. It was also more difficult then. He could feel himself changing as he became better and better at his job, at the way he thought. When he had found the answers to the mysteries, or parts of the answers, he said that he had an active imagination and that was all there was to it. But it wasn’t just imagination. He had thought like them, gone into the darkness like them. He didn’t have a life of his own for long periods of his life; the more clever he became, the more difficult it was to live “normally.” He was alone. He was like a rocky point of land. He didn’t keep track of the time of day. He didn’t keep track of anything more than his mystery. He tended to the mystery, tucked it in, watered it; when it came to the mystery he was a perfectionist, compulsive in his care. His documents lay in straight lines on his desk. At home, his clothes lay in messy piles on the way from the bedroom to the bathroom. He had neat civilian police clothes because he didn’t see any virtue in being a slob, but sure as hell, he was a slob beneath a lovely shell. He tried to cook real food but gave up in the middle of it. He opened a bottle of malt whiskey instead, when hardly anyone knew what malt whiskey was; that put Winter ahead of the game in the normal world, and he tried to drink the whiskey as slowly as possible and listen to the atonal jazz that no one else could stand. Whiskey and jazz, that was his method, when night fell, and so did everything else out there, and he sat in the half darkness with his plots, his mystery, and soon enough with a laptop that dispersed a cold light.
After a few years in the unit he realized that he had found himself because he had slowly lost what had been himself, and he thought that it was nice; it was liberation from normalcy.
• • •
Ellen Börge had been liberated from normalcy. Or had liberated herself. She had gone out to buy a magazine and never come back. It really had happened, reality imitated fiction: Ellen had really gone out to buy a magazine, a so-called women’s magazine. Winter had guessed at first that it was Femina because there was a small pile of Femina magazines on the coffee table, and no other magazines. Her husband, Christer, had no idea. Femina, huh? Well, I have no idea. She didn’t say.
She had never arrived at the ICA store nearby where she usually bought her magazines, and everything else, too. They were lucky in the sense that the two clerks who had been working that afternoon recognized Ellen Börge and they said they would probably have remembered if she had been there.
Christer Börge had waited for five hours before he called the police. First he was transferred to local district station three, as it had been called then, and after twenty-four hours without Ellen the investigative unit was called in; more specifically the security forces that worked with missing persons reports. Greenhorn Erik Winter had gotten the case; wet-behind-the-ears Winter. He suspected foul play because it was his job to suspect foul play; it was also his nature to suspect foul play, and he had sat in front of the coffee table with Femina on it and asked questions about the twenty-nine-year-old Ellen of her thirty-one-year-old husband. The trio were all about the same age, but Winter felt like an outsider; he hadn’t met Ellen, and Christer hadn’t rejoiced when Winter arrived. Christer had been nervous, but Winter didn’t understand what kind of nervousness it was. That kind of understanding of people required years of being an interrogator. It wasn’t something that could be taught at the police academy. All you could do was wait for years, or wait them out, ask your questions again and again, read faces, listen to the words and simultaneously try to understand their implications. Winter had known even then, at the beginning of time, in 1987, that scholars of literature talked about subtext, and that was a good word for police interrogations, too: there could be a gulf between what was said and what was meant.
“You waited five hours before you called the police,” he had said to Börge. This was no question.
“Yeah, so what?”
Börge had shifted on the sofa across from him. Winter had been sitting in an easy chair, some kind of white plush; he had thought that the furniture seemed too . . . adult for people of his same age, the whole home seemed . . . established, lived
in, as though by a couple in late middle age, but here he didn’t trust his own judgment; his own apartment was two rooms with a bed and a table and some kind of easy chair, and in a direct interrogation he wouldn’t have been able to account for what kind of furniture he had, and what its purpose was.
But Börge would be able to account for everything in his home, a complete contents list down to the number of napkins in the second kitchen drawer from the top. Winter had been sure of it. Börge had looked like someone who had to have total control if the world were to retain its normalcy. His wife looked about the same in a photograph that stood on the coffee table, a conservative face, a hairstyle that didn’t take any chances, a gaze that was somewhere else. But Ellen had had beautiful features, neat and regular, in that photo. It was a face that could be nearly sensational in a different context, with a different hairstyle, and Winter had thought, while sitting in the chair, that perhaps Ellen Börge hadn’t been so happy with her husband. Too much control. Maybe children had been planned in their timetable, but not for a couple of years, when the moon was in the correct position, when the tide had gone out, when finances permitted it. Winter didn’t have any thoughts of children himself, but on the other hand he didn’t have a woman to share such thoughts with.
Maybe Ellen hadn’t been able to stand it.
Five hours. Then her husband had called the police. If Christer was who he seemed to be, he ought to have called immediately. Demanded his rights. Demanded a massive effort. Demanded his wife back.
Winter had wondered.
“Weren’t you worried? Five hours can be a long time when you’re waiting for someone.”
“Would you have done anything if I’d called earlier, huh?” Börge’s voice had suddenly become more clear, almost shrill. “Wouldn’t you just have said that we had to wait and see?”
“Have you called before?” Winter asked. “Has Ellen disappeared before?”
“Uh . . . no. I just mean that you have to wait. You know, that’s what you read. The police wait and see, right?”
“It depends,” said Winter, who was suddenly the one answering questions. This was difficult; interrogations were very difficult. “It’s impossible to generalize.”
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